My Mother: Demonology: A Novel (Acker, Kathy) - Softcover

Acker, Kathy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802134033 ISBN 13: 9780802134035

Publisher: Grove Press, 1994

Synopsis

Based loosely on the relationship between Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille, My Mother: Demonology is the powerful story of a woman's struggle with the contradictory impulses for love and solitude. At the dawn of her adult life, Laure becomes involved in a passionate and all-consuming love affair with her companion, B. But this ultimately leaves her dissatisfied, as she acknowledges her need to establish an identity independent of her relationship with him. Yearning to better understand herself, Laure embarks on a journey of self-discovery, an odyssey that takes her into the territory of her past, into memories and fantasies of childhood, into wildness and witchcraft, into a world where the power of dreams can transcend the legacies of the past and confront the dilemmas of the present. With a poet's attention to the power of language and a keen sense of the dislocation that can occur when the narrative encompasses violence and pornography, as well as the traumas of childhood memory, Kathy Acker here takes another major step toward establishing her vision of a new literary aesthetic.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

The Marquis de Sade for mindless headbangers, Acker (Portrait of An Eye, etc.) here continues her endless stream of ranting about sex, politics, and the pain of childhood. Narrator Laure vents her anger and rage against repressive religions and her parents, who consider poor people inferior. She leaves home and begins her sexual adventures, which include lots of anonymous coupling, some random lesbianism, and casual S&M. Various characters defile religious objects with excrement, and there are also plenty of maggots and menstruation. At one point, the narrator seems to enter a boarding school straight out of Dario Argento's cult classic Suspiria, except that in this version a girl is found hanged by her tampon string. The trendy allusions proliferate: a hip mix of high and low cult. Lacan meets James Dean; Aerosmith kicks it up with Juan Goytisolo; and Radley Metzger is spliced with Luis Bu¤uel. Things turn into a bizarre version of Wuthering Heights, in which the narrator becomes Healthcliff, who becomes an animal. Further episodes find the (same?) narrator in a monastery of horny monks presided over by a head monk named Bush. If this political allegory is too difficult to follow, the next section launches into an explicit attack on ``President Bush'' and ``Mayor Koch.'' Ostensibly about love and desire, this humorless screed reveals a connoisseur's delight in body odors and functions. The author's sententiousness runs to such lines as: ``Moral ambiguity's the color of horror.'' Acker clearly likes to preach to the converted. Those who would be offended are unlikely to be attracted here. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Acker's ( Blood and Guts in High School ) 10th novel continues her well-established tradition of nontraditional prose: she borrows from both absurdism and metafiction, yet the final product is her own--a haunting and sometimes amusing fictional event. In a voice at once disturbing and wryly humorous, her narrator, Laure, recounts both dreams and real events to subtly weave together a dark autobiography. Laure's journey from the emotional and sexual abuses of childhood to the confusion of a girls' boarding school is fraught with psychological tortures, both created by and imposed upon her. Her attempt to overcome her parents' cruelty, her fetishization of various friends and lovers, and her eventual transformation into a weathered, motorcycle-riding bohemian are all told in vivid if surreal detail. Acker infuses often shocking social and political commentary that never detracts from her voice--everyone from the Marquis de Sade to H. Ross Perot fits right into the stew. Yet the book may leave some readers cold. Acker's constant graphic references to bodily functions and violent sexual acts are part of the experimental voice, but readers may feel as if the experiment--and the joke, as well--is on them. Despite inspired writing and astute observations, the novel ultimately fails to make us care. What emerges is a hallucinatory amalgam of emotion and desire, held together by a series of abstract events.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802134033
• ISBN 13: 9780802134035
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268